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• 1 2024-07-22T14:23:09-04:00 Wallace Thurman (1902-1934): Author Page 4 Biography and Links to Writings by Author Wallace Thurman plain 2025-10-04T11:37:25-04:00 Born in 1902 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Wallace Thurman grew up with a love for literature, reading everything from juvenile books to Emerson, Shakespeare, Plato, Hardy, and Freud. He attended West Salt Lake High School and then briefly pursued premedical studies at the University of Utah in 1920. Thurman then attended the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California—Los Angeles but left before completing his degree. Instead, he embarked on a short yet intense and influential literary career. In 1923, he became an associate editor at the Black Los Angeles newspaper Pacific Defender, where he first encountered the Harlem Renaissance by meeting Arna Bontemps. 
  
  Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, Thurman sought to create a Black literary movement on the West Coast, founding the magazine The Outlet, which published six issues. However, financial troubles led him to leave Los Angeles for Harlem in 1925. In Harlem, Thurman quickly established himself as a notable literary figure, serving as a literary critic and opening up publication opportunities for young writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He published poetry (see award-winning “God’s Edict”), short stories, and satirical essays in Opportunity, and co-edited FIRE!! (see his Preface with “Fire Burns” commentary), a magazine aimed at challenging the norms of the Renaissance. His residence with Richard Bruce Nugent became a central hub for Harlem’s Black bohemia (see “The Last Citadel”), where the pair was known for its extravagance and progressive lifestyle (see “Cordelia the Crude” for a unique take on Harlem’s Roosevelt Theatre). 
  
  Also known for his fiction and screenplays, Thurman’s first novel The Blacker the Berry (1929) dealt with themes of racial identity with bitter irony. His second novel Infants of the Spring offered a satirical account of the Harlem Renaissance; however, it did not receive much attention due to its publication timing at the end of the peak years of the Renaissance and the height of economic depression (see our bio of Richrd Bruce Nugent to see plagiarism allegations for this novel). Despite this, Thurman continued to write, creating screenplays for Foy Productions in Hollywood working across Black and white professional environments. Although his life was cut short in 1934, Thurman left an incredible mark on the Harlem Renaissance, contributing significantly to its movement, especially editorially and as a critic, working on publications not mentioned such as The Messenger (1925-26), The World Tomorrow (1926), Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life (1928), True Story (1932), and the Macaulay Company (1932). 
  
  Works Cited 
  Cary D. Wintz, and Paul Finkelman. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Routledge, 2004. (Accessed via EBSCOhost)
  Van Notten, Eleonore. Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance. Netherlands, Brill, 2022.